Somewhere in covid19 impacted, New York, April 3, 2020
A neighbor reported a troubling incident in the parking lot of our local supermarket yesterday. An angry customer leaving the market walked toward his parked car. Arriving near the center of the lot, he stopped and yelled out loudly to no one in particular: ‘’Could anyone— please tell me...where do I get some doggone toilet paper?. I’m desperate!”
The shelves in the paper aisle—where stacks upon stacks of this commodity were once packed nearly to the ceiling, have been empty now for a good week. If someone coughs somewhere in the store that is the aisle to head to—the paper aisle—you can be alone there. Toilet tissue has become a rare and valuable commodity. And is now simply unavailable anywhere. One wonders what those hoarders are doing with it? One could only use so much at a time.
As a senior citizen with a good memory I can’t remember a time in the past when toilet tissue was simply NOT AVAILABLE. I can report that I have almost never before encountered such a serious threat to sanitary propriety and personal comfort.
It’s certainly not a paper shortage. Here in the USA, our extensive forests have always provided abundant wood pulp to supply our massive needs for paper and toilet tissue and then some. Sadly, to provide this needed commodity we must sacrifice living, mature, green trees. They are cut in the prime of life from our (carbon dioxide absorbing) forests to produce the wood pulp for toilet tissue— which we dispose of so casually. To produce a mere 200 rolls of the soft stuff manufactures must sacrifice a tree that may have been growing and absorbing carbon from the atmosphere since before you were born. It’s claimed that Americans use almost 150 rolls per person each year. That amounts to a lot of trees cut and forests diminished. Some folks must be stockpiling the equivalent of several “a good wood lot worth” of TP in their basements, cubbies and closets.
I have to go back many decades into my youth in the years just after WWII and at a time of another great pandemic (Poliomyelitis) to recall a time when toilet paper was—perhaps not missing from the shelves—but was absent in my life.
I was only a boy of nine or ten years old, during that other terrible disease epidemic—the Polio Epidemic (1940s-50s) At the height of the “polio” fear and panic in the summer of 1949 my sister and I were sent to live with my grandfather in far off rural and socially isolated Smithtown, Long Island. In those days eastern Long Island was very much the land of open spaces, dominated by large estates, potato farms, and here and there small, scattered villages separated by acres and acres of wooded lands.
Grandfather (a widower) and his second wife (my step-grandmother) loved the country life. Both had emigrated to the USA in their youth from affluent circumstances in Italy where as children they vacationed in their parent’s rural country homes. Nostalgia for the past and the simpler life of their childhood stimulated them to attempt to recreate a country life style that in some ways recalled late 19th century Europe .
But beyond those motivations there was another. Grandpa had great admiration for two men: one was our 3rd President, Thomas Jefferson, on whom he was a minor scholar, and the other was Giuseppe Verdi, the Italian composer. Grandfather took seriously Jefferson’s concept of the small landholder and yeoman farmer as the ideal citizen. These individuals and their families were seen as the backbone of a nation of free, independent, creative and productive citizens who would generate great wealth from their efforts working the land. Grandpa tried to emulate what he considered to be the quintessential Jeffersonian American ideals of independence and self sufficiency in his own life. The country home in Smithtown was his attempt at the recreation of these ideals, but as well, it functioned to relive a life style that my grandparents knew and loved as children.
Their two-bedroom, gambrel-roofed bungalow was set among trees on two acres of level land with a wood lot, a large garden, an orchard and several outbuildings. This isolated recreation of 19th century living was the homestead where my sister and I ended up as refugees from the polio epidemic that summer in 1949. The interior was comfortable and well appointed with nice but dated furnishings, but like a 19th century European county home, it had no indoor plumbing and no electricity. My sister and I slept in a spacious attic loft, reached by way of a narrow stairwell and trap door in the floor of the attic. I remember well the large kitchen and the big, black, wood-fired stove. The kitchen sink had a hand pump that drew rain water from a cistern dug into the ground under the house.
There was no indoor “bathroom”. The “room” for that biological function was a five by six foot frame structure with a gable roof and a rough wood door located about fifty feet from the house. In the interior, a rough-wood bench seat stretched from one side to the other. Two white painted toilet seats hid two “comfort” holes and acted to seal off the dark and deep interior—the functional element of the buidling. Grandpa insisted that we keep the top seats in closed positions at all times. We always obeyed that rule. The “outhouse” was just about invisible from the bungalow, located as it was at the end of a narrow dirt path in a grove of Mulberry and Poplar trees which always seemed to be growing more luxuriantly than the others near-by.
Since my grandparents did not drive, supplies were collected on a “desperate need basis” by means of a mile walk along the county road to the village and the local market. Grandpa and I often made the trip together, accompanied by “Beauty” grandpa’s big friendly and protective “Spitzbergen ” dog. On the way out, I sometimes got a ride in the well-crafted wood wagon grandpa had built for this purpose. On the way home we all walked.
At the market the wagon was loaded for the walk home. Thinking back, I don’t recall ever seeing any toilet tissue being packed into the wagon. To grandpa’s thinking that particular product was not that valuable of a commodity to take up the scarce space in the small wagon. As a consequence soft tissue paper, so in demand at the present, was completely absent in the old country house on Smithtown Lane —and in the “outhouse” I knew as a young boy.
This was a post WWII world—a time of “making do” with scarcity and using and adapting one item to other sometimes incongruent purposes. Grandpa grew his own vegetables, collected his own eggs, made his own wine and brandy and roasted his own chicory-adulterated coffee. He saved everything, string, rope, old screws and nails, and he even had a big ball of salvaged “silver foil” (our aluminum foil). So it was no surprise that the hefty last year’s Sears & Roebuck cataloged was adapted to a new purpose. It was that thin scratchy paper of the catalogue which was repurposed into the sanitary commodity we are finding in scarce supply these days. On my first visit to the outhouse I was introduced to the old S&R catalogue nailed to the side wall by a long ten penny nail driven through its corner spine.
I immediately understood the obvious “shortcomings” of this substitute over the real thing, but accepting that—I soon adapted and could —like grandpa—list a few advantages over the typical white roll. It was cheap. In fact, it was free. Sears and Roebuck Company mailed it gratis to all its customers. It was more compact for packing—with almost as many “sheets” as the rolled item and fit more easily in the supply wagon than the bulky rolls. The 8in x10in thin, crinkly sheets were of ample size. But even better, they served two functions, that is: as a relaxing, comforting and informative reading material, as well as for the other purpose.
I recall perusing these yellow-tinted sheets with great interest while—seated and otherwise occupied. Furthermore, if the exposed sheet—that next sheet to be put to use—, had adverts which were not to your particular interest, one could simply flip through the catalog for something that was of more interest and of your choice.
As a ten year old, I was not much enthused about bedding and furniture, but I could be attracted to Sears & Roebuck’s offerings in the sections on farm tools, shot-guns, fishing equipment, hardware, and especially kid’s toys. Furthermore, you could, without any sense of guilt at all, just jettison any uninteresting pages—say on ladies undergarments, or bedding and bed sheets and go on to another page that might be of more interest. Tipping over and tossing pages down the hole was no problem. One always felt confident that in the “outhouse system” of waste disposal there was no worry concerning clots of paper causing clogs, or cesspools overflowing, or plugged waste lines in need extensive professional and costly attention.. In the outhouse simple gravity did its work for you in an efficient nearly noiseless manner. Then silent biological decay took care of the rest. Furthermore, there was no concern about “aerosolization” (as there is today in the corona virus outbreak) contaminating the air with disease germs caused by noisy flushing and bubbling in a modern toilet.
And time was not wasted— a prime concern for a ten year old boy with a busy summer schedule of exploration and discovery in the country, For even “outhouse time” became interesting and informative with all this free and well- illustrated reading material available, There were many new words to learn and much to marvel at in the catalogue concerning what adults used, how much these items cost and what Sears & Roebuck’s owners thought people wanted to buy.
Looking back, it seems that spending time in social isolation in a time of a disease epidemic was not much of an inconvenience for a ten year old boy in old Smithtown, NY, even if one had to suffer with no toilet tissue available.
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